Politics

John McCain, who shed a playboy image in his youth to become a fighter pilot, revered prisoner of war and both an independent voice in the Republican Party and its 2008 presidential nominee, died on Saturday, little more than a year after he was told he had brain cancer. He was 81.

McCain’s family said in a statement "Senator John Sidney McCain III died at 4:28 p.m. on August 25, 2018." He announced on July 19, 2017, that he had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain tumor. Earlier this week his family announced he was discontinuing treatment.

It was a Sunday morning last year in late August, and Shevrin Jones was in church feeling just a little hungover.

He’d been out drinking the previous night with his brother, Kaneil, and now they were sitting next to each other at a pew in Koinonia Worship Center in Hollywood. As their father gave the sermon, Shevrin Jones leaned on his older sibling and whispered, “Thank you.”

On his campaign to represent a state House district stretching through the heart of Miami’s historically black communities, Cedric McMinn is touting his experience: as a former executive director of the local Democratic Party, as chief of staff to School Board Member Dorothy Bendross-Mindingall, and as an outreach director in Florida for the Barack Obama and Charlie Crist campaigns.

The fact that he is openly gay is incidental, if not irrelevant to his platform.

In September, Montgomery County, Maryland, will open a new elementary school named for Bayard Rustin, a not oft remembered leader who played a pivotal role in the burgeoning civil rights era.

Rustin helped spark a movement that would change the course of American history — even if his name might not be as instantly recognizable as others in the civil rights movement. He was an adviser and an intellectual who, unlike some of his fellow organizers, kept a relatively low profile.

Vermont Democrats made Christine Hallquist the first openly transgender person to win a major party nomination for statewide office in U.S. history as she clinched Tuesday’s primary election for governor.

She defeated three other Democrats on Tuesday and will take on incumbent Governor Phil Scott, a Republican, in the Nov. 6 general election, unofficial results showed.

“I think Vermont is a beacon of hope for the rest of the country,” Hallquist said during an interview with Reuters. “This is what I call expanding our moral compass and that is what I think it represents.”

When Donald Trump promised at the 2016 Republican National Convention to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” it was heralded as an unprecedented declaration by a GOP presidential nominee — and a sign of hope that Trump would prove more moderate in his gay-rights policies than his party platform. Two years and multiple anti-LGBTQ policies later, a new book by his former press secretary Sean Spicer reveals that the sentence in Trump’s convention speech was nothing more than empty payback for a political favor.

A black, gay Army veteran has 'come out' as conservative because of the 'outrage culture' he said he has experienced within the Democratic Party.

Rob Smith, author of a 2017 book about being a gay man in the military during the 'don't' ask, don't' tell' era, is a registered Democrat and was raised in a liberal working-class family in Ohio. But he said that over the past couple of years what he considers to be left-wing outrage culture has pushed him to become conservative.